To be honest, I wouldn't be caught dead in Ed Hardy. For one thing, there is a huge metaphorical hole in this brand, which trades on the committed authenticity and street-level edginess of Don Ed Hardy's skin art to sell overpriced T-shirts to kids at the mall. Hermes it's not.

Audigier has saturated the market to the extent that now Ed Hardy stands for trend slavery at its most vacant-eyed and autonomic.

Tattoos were intended for your skin. But now you can wear a T-shirt with a tattoo design silk-screened onto it, making temporary tattoos seem like a long-term commitment in comparison. It's edgy! Except not!

This is just the latest step in the co-opting of what once was outlaw culture. Permanence has been bastardized into transience, corrupting the original spirit of the art form.

But Neil acknowledges the genius of transience behind the Ed Hardy moneymaking machine:

Audigier is building, slowly and frighteningly, a 360-degree brand bubble for his clientele, an immersive ecology of labeled merchandise, an off-the-rack psyche. And in an age where a cool, ephemeral brand means everything and nothing, that's brilliant.

What's distressing is that such a vacuous trend is proliferating in dire economic times. Aren't we supposed to be cutting back on crap like this? Hasn't the subprime mortgage crisis taught us to value what's below the surface?

Hardy filed a lawsuit Monday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, seeking $100 million in damages from Audigier's company Nervous Tattoo and several other defendants.

Hardy claims he and Audigier signed a contract in September 2005 that allowed Audigier to promote and distribute Hardy's work as part of a clothing line.

The lawsuit claims Hardy terminated the contract in August after discovering Audigier did not fully pay royalties to Hardy and underreported the sales and income from the clothing line. Hardy also claims Audigier launched a competing product—the Christian Audigier clothing line—using Hardy's trademarks without permission.

The lawsuit said Audigier has not stopped distributing Hardy's work and claims the contract is still in effect. Hardy wants the court to order Audigier to stop distributing his trademarked work and award damages.

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Ed Hardy is one fashion season (or poor endorsement) away from gowing the way of Von Dutch. Horribly douchy brand for yuppie scum. Want to really impress me? Tattoo that shirt to your skin. Color and all. Not a fan of the brand.

As some of you might know, i'm very interested in fashion and i gotta say i hate with passion those shirts, i mean: you don't have a tattoo or even worse, you have one or several tattoos and yet you decide to wear a shirt with a poorly designed vintage tattoo with an ugly chromatic scheme, so you can look "edgy, young and dangerous". That's beyond hipster, it's fake hipster for the clueless middle-upper middle mainstream or the gang member wannabe-poser. (Sorry Steve and Eric).I'd rather see some guy wearing converse and a t-shirt with an obscure 80's/90's pop reference, at least you prove you bother to be interested in something remotely interesting.Seeing Ethier and my son Martin wearing those hideous shirts break my heart, they can do much better than that. Again, what do i know? i'm just a girl who wore today head to toe black, with leggins, booties and rimmed glasses with a nude large bag. Disclaimer: most of the time, i just talk about what people wear if i like it.This was your guest fashion police at SoSG. Did you miss it?